


I'm Not Calling You a Martyr

by Mikkeneko



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Anders is a giver, Developing Friendships, Gen, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-05
Updated: 2017-01-05
Packaged: 2018-09-15 01:38:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9213539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mikkeneko/pseuds/Mikkeneko
Summary: The more Fenris' relationship with Anders edges towards friendship, the less he understands him.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Another work crossposted from Tumblr, this one mostly focusing on Anders' rocky friendship with Fenris.

It was a very long time before Fenris began to understand the mage. Anders. The healer. The abomination.

At first he hadn’t wanted to – he thought he knew everything he needed to know just from knowing the man’s kind, of his deal with demons. He was a magister just like all of them, power-hungry and mad with it; doomed to come to a bad end and the sooner the better, the less people that he might take down with him.

But… five years in Kirkwall had done a lot to broaden his horizons. Given him a breadth of experience that had been stolen from his former life, and taken some of the edge off his fury. Five years of watching Anders heal him and the others, heal the poor, heal the sick, give and give and _give_  until Fenris had no idea how there was anything left of him any more. And the more he watched him do it, the less he understood.

He’d come to accept, grudgingly, that Anders was a good man. That wasn’t the problem. Hawke was also a good man – Hawke also gave generously and helped freely. But it was different. Hawke helped people who asked him for help, and gave gifts to his friends so that they could both share in the joy of it (which was sometimes a hit, sometimes a miss.)

The way Anders helped people was different from Hawke’s gentle generosity. Hawke worked to help others; Anders worked himself to the bone. Hawke gave from wealth and generosity; Anders gave away every last copper and scrap of food. He healed obsessively, gave compulsively, until he had drained himself of all possible joy to be gained from the sharing of it.

Anders gave without limit, unconscious of boundaries – for himself _or_  others. He gave help where it wasn’t asked for, or even wanted, no matter how contentious the circumstance. Even his constant badgering of the blood witch, Merrill, seemed to stem from some deep-seated, wrongheaded conviction that his own depravities made him an authority on her troubles, refusing to back off no matter how clear she made it that she wasn’t interested in his ‘help.’

He did it to Fenris, too. The very first time he’d offered to heal the chronic ache the lyrium brands gave Fenris was in the middle of a raging argument; he’d gone from calling Fenris a sadistic hypocrite to offering to ease his pain with barely a breath between them.

Fenris had been stunned, and deeply suspicious by reflex; he’d assumed that it was some twisted ploy on the mage’s part to gain power over him, to put him in debt – if not to just use the excuse to lay some foul magic on him under the guise of healing. Time and experience had settled that fear, at least; Anders by necessity had healed him many times in battle, and his healing had never been more or other than that. Still, every time Anders offered him healing outside of the battlefield – again and again and again – Fenris always refused. It delighted him even now that he _could_ refuse, that he did not have to bow to a mage’s request, even a benign one, and that was not a privilege he intended to forsake.

But every refusal just seemed to spur the mage on. Anders offered him potions, runes for his equipment; Fenris refused. Anders offered, bizarrely, to help him clean up his mansion, even to cook for him; Fenris refused. And now, today, when he’d caught Fenris limping from a pulled leg muscle on the hike back from Sundermount with Hawke, Anders offered a therepeutic massage; and Fenris refused.

Frustration twisted the mage’s face, mixed with something strange – all the stranger for being so familiar. He flung his hands in the air, overdramatic as ever, and shouted, “I don’t understand you! I don’t know what you _need_  from me!”

It was the choice of word that gave Fenris pause,  the peculiar emphasis that he didn’t understand. Not even 'what you want from me,’ but 'need.’ Why did that bother him so badly? Why did he even care that he didn’t know what Fenris _needed?_

Fenris had learned long ago to make peace with the mage, because Hawke needed him. Everyone needed Anders, some more and some less. Hawke needed him to be a Grey Warden, to guide him through the Deep Roads and keep them alive and healthy. The others needed him to be a healer, in battle and out of it, at least where Isabela was concerned. The people of Darktown needed him to be their shepherd, to put food in their mouths and coin in their pockets. The mages of the Gallows needed him, Fenris knew he wasn’t supposed to know, to spirit them away to freedom.

Everyone needed Anders, because Anders worked himself to death _to make sure that they did_. Everyone except Fenris. And that drove the mage crazy – drove him to fits of frustration and now, uncertain flashes of fear.

Anders needed to be needed. And suddenly, Fenris understood why.

To be needed was to be useful. To be useful was to be valued. To be valued was to be _safe_. A slave that had a skill that was irreplaceable – or nearly so – was a slave who would not be sold or sacrificed for their blood. When the world considered your right to keep existing purely in terms of how much benefit you could bring, being needed kept you alive.

Fenris looked Anders straight in the eye, and saw that same fear, that same desperate need to prove himself valuable, that he’d once lived as a slave. And after five years of knowing him, tolerating him, sniping at him, fighting with him in every sense of the word – he understood him.

“I don’t,” he told Anders, addressing his words right to that frustration, that fear. “I don’t need you, mage. I don’t need your magic, I don’t need your helping hands, and I don’t need _you.”_

Anders flinched back a step, an expression of horror and desolation starting to bloom on his face before he could pull up an angry expression to mask it. “Well, if that’s the case –” he began angrily, but Fenris wasn’t finished.

He took another step into Anders’ personal space, getting right up in his face, not letting Anders pull away. “So consider, mage,” he said clearly. “That when I choose to spend time in your presence, I do so not because I _need_  to – but because I _want_  to.”

Anders stopped retreating, and the hurt look on his face was replaced by bafflement. “…What?” was all he managed to say.

Fenris smirked, one side of his mouth curling up at the victory. Score one for the elf. He turned to walk away – still limping, because that limp was _his_  if he wanted it, because he didn’t have to be in top fighting form for any master ever again – and added over his shoulder, “See you at cards tomorrow night, mage. My mansion. Be there.”

And he left Anders staring after him, completely at a loss, smiling to himself all the way home.

* * *

 

~end.


End file.
